Chuck Griffiths from Wisconsin used to work for a government agency but when the agency laid off half its workers in the recession Chuck lost his home, his car and had to BBQ the dog to stop the children from starving. But Chuck is one of many Americans who are fully behind the government surveillance of internet and email which is estimated to have cost $500 billion so far. “Look at the figures,” says Chuck “the reality is this is essential and value for money. Since the programme started in conjunction with the free-phone hot-line in Walmart, it has probably helped to identify thousands of suspected potentially nascent plans to conspire to commit threats of various sorts and at least 10 of those got as far as Mohammad emailing his brother in Colorado about his “Mother” in Iraq and how they were going to “help her get medicine for her arthritis”. Without the intelligence services we would never have been able to de-code these sinister messages.”
The US government has confirmed that although the programme got off to a slow start in 2001 as no-one really used email and there were very few videos of cute kittens available then it was now an integral part of the intelligence gathering armoury. An official released figures showing that intelligence on possible potential threats had been provided to many other countries although both of them denied receiving it and the Metropolitan police commented “Frankly it’s easier just to use our normal highly effective methods like stopping vehicles without insurance or picking on foreign-looking blokes with poor facial hair arrangements.” A spokeperson for David Cameron said “We never comment on security issues, but it’s great that the Americans are prepared to do this for us and we are sure that one day it will prove potentially useful for something, maybe they’ll devise a way for filtering out those annoying kitten videos, who knows?”